Re: ha-tikvah really yigdal

[W. Morrison <sushiqn...>]

>Dear Hope and Jewish Music Friends:
>
>The "ha-tikvah" tune you speak of is the same as the Yigdal tune,

With all due respect to Idelsohn, I don't hear it. Sure, the first 5 notes
(and the pickup, if you count that) are the same, but then it goes totally
somewhere else. For one thing, Yigdal goes into the relative major in the
fifth measure (earlier, depending on interpretation), where it stays for
four measures. Hatikvah stays in the minor mode for at least eight
measures. The high part of Hatikvah is not heard at all in Yigdal. The
rhythmic and melodic patterns, the length and arrangement of the phrases,
nothing else is the same, other than those few introductory notes.

There are only 12 distinct tones in the Western scale. It is only natural
that certain pleasing arrangements of notes will be shared by different
tunes. There is a traditional Swedish schottische that is extremely
reminiscent of Hatikvah throughout the A part, so much so that when I play
it at a dance, all the Jews do a double take. That doesn't mean that one of
them derived from the other, or that they are in any way related
historically.

I don't question the connection to Smetana, and undoubtedly some of the
other  Eastern European folk melodies -- no doubt the scholars are correct
that Hatikvah is derivative, or whatever it is they agree on regarding its
origin. I haven't studied it, as it is not particularly of interest to me.
But the comparison to Yigdal doesn't appear to stand up to a musical
analysis. I think it's pretty tenuous.

Ethnomusicologists love to make charts of similar musical motives, and
study the possibilities that a given tune was actually derived from another
given tune, and then announce their version of the truth. I've seen this
kind of thing discussed and debated endlessly in Irish music as well, which
is more rigid in form and restricted in geography, and where the
connections are easier to make -- I've even done a fair amount of
hypothesizing myself. But nobody alive today was around when this music was
being formed and disseminated, and these folk musicians weren't keeping
records of where they got the tunes from. After all the hard data is in,
and all the obvious musical connections have been drawn, the rest is just
speculation, an entertaining mental exercise. "Vass you dere, Charlie?" (ob
expl: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy)

I have a great deal of respect for scholarship and erudition, but I take
these sorts of pronouncements with a healthy pinch of kosher salt.

Wendy

----

>attributed by Beer in the 18th century to Leon Singer, and known as
>"Leoni". Later it was adopted by Christians as the hymn: The God of
>Abraham, Praise".
>
>A.Z. Idelsohn considered it a compilation of a Jewish folk motive and a
>Spanish-Basque cancio as well as Slavic song.... and he lays it all out in
>a table XXVIII of motives on p. 222-225 (Shocken paperback edition) of his
>basic musicological work: "Jewish music in its historical development".
>Idelsohn considered Yigdal, the Smetana work, the Basque songs, a Polish
>folk tune, a Spanich cancio and of course, ...Hatikvah... all essentially
>the same tune.
>
>In a way you are all "right" about the origins... perhaps pieces of it came
>from different places......My question is: If Rossi and Monteverdi's
>version was a composed, "original" of the tune in 1600's, how did this tune
>show up in such diverse places? Didn't  some of these predate S.  de Rossi?
>Isn't just as likely that Rossi used a common tune he heard?
>
>To Hope:
>I read someplace that this same "Yigdal" tune was in fact much older and
>not of European origin at all... that it likely predates the Babylonian
>exile because essential elements of the tune are extant in diverse
>communities from Yemen to Roumania... 1) Have you read this? and 2) has
>anyone substantiated this claim and do you know a source?
>
>
>-
>Judy Fertig
>Reference Librarian
>Brandeis University
>Goldfarb Library MS045
>415 South Street                               phone:(617-736-4705)
>Waltham, MA 02254-9110                 email: fertig (at) brandeis(dot)edu